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Friday, January 25, 2013

`The Swearing of the Bargemen'

A
syllabus made up solely of Robert Burton and his admirers -- Johnson, Sterne, Lamb,
Coleridge, Keats, Melville, Beckett and Anthony Powell, among others – would rival
any education a graduate school might promise. Burton contains multitudes --
Hamlet, Polonius and Laertes. Powell
took the title of his first novel, Afternoon
Men, from a passage in The Anatomy of
Melancholy, and the narrator of A
Dance to theMusic of Time, Nick
Jenkins, writes a biography of Burton. The final novel in that twelve-novel
sequence, Hearing Secret Harmonies,
closes with a savory catalog lifted from the Anatomy, beginning like this:

“I
hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires,
inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies,
apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and
preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles
fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights,
peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms,” and so on, for another
two-hundred words. In an essay on Burton from 1977, collected in Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers
1946-1989, Powell writes:

“At
Oxford, when plagued with melancholy, Burton, who seems always to have enjoyed
a joke, used to go down to the bridge over the river, and listen to the
bargemen swearing at each other. That would always make him laugh, and at once
feel better.”

The
Anatomy is judged a forbidding volume
– oversized, endlessly digressive and allusive, interlarded with lengthy
borrowing in Latin and Greek. All true, and that’s where the fun only begins.
Both Burton and the bargemen make regular appearances in this self-revealing
book. The author is perfectly aware of his effect even on modern readers. (The
book was an immediate bestseller when published in 1621, and has seldom gone
out of print.) He is writing an anatomy and, simultaneously, a parody of
anatomies, any human striving after universal knowledge. The first edition totaled
almost nine-hundred pages, and Burton published five revisions, each time adding to the bulk.

When
Lamb writes of Burton, he speaks of a cherished friend. Elia calls him “the
fantastic great old man,” and senses a spiritual kinship in their mingling of
melancholy and good humor. In “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” Lamb contrasts
his taste in books with those of Bridget (Elia’s stand-in for Lamb’s sister
Mary):

“We
are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for
the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange
contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof
our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies.
Narrative teazes me.”

The
best-known endorsement of Burton is probably Johnson’s, as reported by Boswell:

“Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy is a valuable
book. It is perhaps overloaded with quotation; but there is great spirit and a
great power in what Burton says, when he writes from his own mind. It is the
only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise.”

Johnson
knew melancholy firsthand and he knew books. His enthusiasm for the Anatomy suggests he found in it
consolation, solace almost medicinal. In some men, humor and heartbreak must
mingle. In Section III, Member I, Subsection II, of the Anatomy, “Symptoms or Signs in the Mind,” Burton writes:

“And
though they laugh many times, and seem to be extraordinary merry (as they will
by fits), yet extreme lumpish again in an instant, dull and heavy, semel et
simul, merry and sad, but most part sad.”

Burton
died on this date, Jan. 25, in 1640, age sixty-two. Addressing the rumor that
Burton may have hanged himself, Powell writes:

“Such
an act might certainly have fitted in with Burton’s sometimes black humour, but
I feel the call of listening once again to the swearing of the bargemen would
somehow have prevented that.”